


drop the fear, jump a tier

by transvav



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universes in discussion, Creeper Gavin, M/M, SecretSpringfic, minecraft au, sprinkle of kings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 09:31:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18775534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transvav/pseuds/transvav
Summary: monsters, he finds, do not sleep like the rest.[ king of monsters, prince of thieves, stormchaser - ]





	drop the fear, jump a tier

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Krembearry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krembearry/gifts).



> happy spring, krem!!!!! i really just kind of went all out prose poetic on this one i really hope it's legible and not Too Much anyways i lov u VERY much muah

gavin is a lot of things.

ryan likes to watch him, in the mornings, when the sun peaks the horizon and the prince opens the door. sunrise, every morning, like clockwork, gavin greets the pink sky and stretches.

it’s only this time that gavin has his hood and cloak and scarves off, and it’s the only time, if anyone besides the two of them were awake, the others would see gavin’s scales and fur patches, the green amongst the tanned, the translucence in his palms as he stretches up to the sky, half asleep, endlessly warming some type of curiosity in ryan’s chest.

they never talk about this, of course. gavin knows ryan’s there, and ryan knows gavin could stop at any point he wanted. but to sate an endlessness in the both of them, they say nothing, they stop nothing. the sun is their normalcy, their meeting point, and when it gets to a point in the sky when the light covers the whole of ryan’s hallway through his glass, when his door is illuminated in blinding heat and he can slip into the waterfall while it’s warm, that’s when the two of them can rejoin the others like nothing happened the night before. like nothing happened that morning, in the rebirth of the sunlight over their little cove.

 

they didn’t do this in achievement city, for some reason. maybe it was the distance between their houses, the unsureness of whether the carpeted logo was soft enough to go unheard. the closeness between all the living spaces‒ how michael and lindsay lived right across from ryan, and often, in their early marriage, would stay up late at night, to talk and spend time alone together without the others at their back. how they would’ve seen when ryan left his storage turned home, and how they could have tracked his movements to gavin’s art gallery of a shelter.

there were reasons.

but the call to each other is stronger in their cove. gavin’s carving into the mountain is something of another comfort to him, and ryan’s place is the distance he needs. but he’s above gavin, and the waves are too loud on jeremy’s logo, on the jones’ private beach, and the separation between houses too far. even jack, with all his windows, would be unable to see.

so ryan breathes the life into the ender pearls he stashes away, and meets gavin at the front door, bathed in moonlight, purple magic floating near stray blonde hairs, shards of pearls buried in the ground like crystals. gavin grins at him in kind, hair loose around his shoulders, and pulls him out of the moon’s eye, into redstone lit cavernous ceilings and the soft scent of burning pine. it’s something unique to him, ryan finds in the months he spends with the hybrid‒ the smell of forests, of wood smoke, needles and rosemary used for fuel. the aftermath of a storm, petrichor and drifting summer thunder.

gavin tells him he smells like machinery. metal on metal, working smoke, oil burning and gasoline. says he feels like gears have been running for his heart and sandpaper has been made for his hands, that his face is a mask of frustrating material that leaves gavin scratching and longing to feel. gavin’s made for this, to observe, to feel, to smell the things that no one else can. he’s a wild boy, always has been, king of monsters, prince of thieves, heir of the forest, and if his touch wasn’t small lightning in a bottle then ryan’s sure the others would let him describe them too. maybe ryan’s numb to it‒ maybe he’s the only one who can stand it. but gavin’s hands leave imprints in his skin, his blood, his memory and heart, and their touch lingers always in the small shocks ryan gives to doorknobs when he means to go back home.

god forbid them both, ryan thinks in the lulls of their nights, when the moon is too high to touch the windows in gavin’s home, and the stars mock his inability to sleep in peace.

 

what they have, the others would call dangerous.

they’ve called the two of them dangerous before‒ separately, of course, and ryan had his danger tied to his false madness, the gripping want of royalty in his blood, his less than pleasant demeanor when he’d bore the crown thrice over. gavin, though, they call a danger to himself. tripping and breaking glass‒ the crystals and pearls in his garden worry them, because they look like glass. who’s done that, they ask, geoff coddles. who breaks glass to bury it in their front yard, gavin?

he’s feral, though, and ryan laughs at the idea that gavin _wouldn’t_ do that. thinks about how geoff believes he’s got such a hold on who gavin is. ryan knows who gavin is‒ and it’s not because of their nightly sessions. no, ryan’s always known about gavin. about the firestarter and the glass breaker, the boy who lures the bull to the chinashop and locks the bull inside. the lavacatcher, the mob speaker, pickpocket, stormchaser. king’s charge and king himself, boy with the tree he’d put in the sky and the kid who has a power to make anyone do anything.

gavin’s dangerous in the sense that ryan isn’t, the trouble maker for the sake of fun, chaotic in ways lindsay isn’t, sometimes. gavin’s dangerous because of his inhumanity, because of the wild magic that changes him in ways the others have only understood once.

(that world had been so dangerous, and in the first time they’d experienced it, ryan had been his bed mate’s demise. it had haunted him, in the underworld, how gavin had strayed far from him surrounded by that red. their revival into the cove led to their apology meeting, and the second time they entered another world like it, they’d had no chance to share their time. but ryan had come back, at one point, with magic in his heart, scales up his arm and face and an eye as purple as dragon’s breath. he choked on what he was and felt it all‒ the smell of jeremy’s lingering obsessions, the iron of the dagger he’d once held, the biting sting of water spray and the salt scratching his throat when he drank. for once, he’d understood why gavin was so willing to eat anything, always hungry, and no distinction. the meat all smelled the same.)

gavin is wild, and untamed, and made to both live with and against them, and ryan‒

 

there’s a night they’re away from home.

they’re in a forest‒ of course they are‒ and the boys are back home, calling them to say to make their beds and spend the night there. keep safe, and keep watch. when the com cuts out gavin presses just too close to push comfort in the moss and leaves they’ve set down. ryan imagines‒ he wants to believe he imagines, anyways‒ the trees curling closer together, to make them a little cage to stay protected in. not that anything will harm them, here, not with gavin so close. and gavin’s electricity pulls him back to focus, fingertips at the least tracing ryan’s jaw. above them the moon winks into an eclipse, and ryan laughs against gavin’s lips, because the world and heavens mock their past lives and destinies.

in another world it’s how they are meant to be, in the sky, a moon and sun, and it’s how they really were, too, dancing their dance in the stars. michael and gavin’s little union had pulled ryan into his thoughts. it was mostly a joke, he remembers, but the look gavin had given him when he’d picked the ring up instead, at first‒

another shock. kissing gavin is like kissing heated metal, kissing melting candles, shattered marble busts and broken golden towers. the kingdom was forgotten a while back but gavin is royalty to his core, and the feeling ryan has for that isn’t jealousy, but lust, for power, for bloodline, for fire and lightning storms.

for gavin, supercharged, blue and effervescent against the blood moon, hair draped forward like curtains against the prying eyes of curious subjects.

ryan’s lips are numb in the morning, bitten bruises across his and gavin’s shoulders, tight fingernail markings across their backs, primal instincts stronger in the forest as they’re meant to be.

static runs through him the rest of the day, phantom shivers going up his spine every time he looks to gavin, to his‒

supercharged, ryan thinks, finding drowned watching him from the bottom of the rivers, is such a fitting word.

 

and ryan is in his bed nightly, surrounded by cold stone and torches‒ redstone burns like ice, ruby frost on the walls, but it’s not uncomfortable. gavin’s growing greenery in the corners, intentional or not, plants unpotted and free to their reign in his little home. he could grow a garden here, for all the light he’s made of, the sun lingering in his skin where it favors. immunity to the sun is a perk of his other blood, and ryan finds himself thinking often of the possibilities where he was not‒ to see gavin with that demanding endless blue in his eyes, but for him to live in the water, to smell of kelp and salt, seems _wrong_.

they’re dancing again, special to the both of them in ways the others cannot and do not want to understand. before this, when there were flowers in the dirt by geoff’s house and the castle was roofless, they’d danced before. a trade off, and though gavin, at first, had earned no favor in ryan’s games, the sharpness of a blade is unchallenged, often, when the beast it slays was previously weakened. they cannot die, but the king’s oath was one of death by the next victor.

ryan had wanted to keep gavin from that‒ to keep his blade from gavin’s neck.

in his pull away was his confession, just as gavin’s final games were his to ryan’s. they traded the crown, and they traded the scars‒ wounds by each other were left there for eternities, their destinies, their worlds. the moon was the same in each. they’d stabbed each other in the heart, and the words, left from their tongues, were said all the same, and never acknowledged.

unintentionally, they promised. with nothing but their swords‒ swords they _lost_ , because things were just things, but they were them, forever and timeless in their twisting worlds, and back then they hadn’t even known.

because back then, ryan hadn’t smelt of gasoline‒ perhaps of leather, and beef, sweat and ironwork, copper tastes, but still with sandpaper hands and a masked face. and back then, gavin had smelt so strongly of the forest, but less of a storm, the sizzle of flint and coal instead of rain and the power it brought with it, subdued and afraid, and no lightning in his touch. back then there was no meeting, no morning watch, no moonlight sonata and forest night together. back then, ryan had witnessed gavin in the before.

the moon had been different for him then, and he had been different too, sharp in ways he wasn’t now, empty in ways he isn’t. ryan only watched him once, in the night, before the sunrise.

 

monsters, he finds, do not sleep like the rest of them.

 

and gavin, they all forget, is, among other things, monstrous.

 

the night he watches, in the old city, with the bedspreads, and geoff’s monolith, the night he watches gavin, it’s a full moon. werewolves are a myth, and most other things are not. the smell of rain is in the air‒ a storm is coming. they plan to leave the next day, because their home is breaking apart, torn by something unseen.

gavin has been restless.

at sunset, he leaves his house. the others are too busy packing to notice, but ryan watches‒ the stretch towards the skyline, translucence between the fingers, green patches up the back of his neck and arms, and boots forgone. when the sun dips below the horizon, the traces of color are left to paint the sky, swirling oranges fading into deep, blackish blues, splattered stars blinking awake like they had time and time again.

ryan watches gavin from a distance, hand hovered on the knob. he can’t stop watching, really. gavin is magnetic, and ryan is going blind.

he spreads his arms outwards and grins, dark and large, wider than the cheshire, and smoke pours from the gaps in his teeth. he chitters and hisses and it sends alarm bells ringing in ryan’s head and he tenses, preparing for the smell of gunpowder and the fizzle of the expand. it never comes, of course, and gavin’s head whips around, growling low in a purr that sends ryan into his home, towards his bed, into the uncomforting warmth of wool that scratches at his skin like thorns on the rose bushes, and pulls the covers up to his chin. he’s not afraid, he tells himself, of gavin.

except, when he closes his eyes, the stars scream behind his eyelids and cry impossibly soft, soft enough to echo like the loudest thing in the world.

he may not rest now‒

there are monsters nearby.

 

maybe that’s why he’s mocked, later on, when he tries so hard to sleep.

the monster nearby is closer than ever before, tucked against his chest, nails dulling by the second as he rests. he’s soft in the light, shirtless and curled, his hair twisting with vines that ryan hadn’t noticed in the morning. they’re getting closer to the full moon again, and ryan promises himself he’ll find out the truth this coming night.

they’re far from the forest, but there are fireflies dancing in the open spots of gavin’s door, like the stars come knocking to remind him of the things he can’t have, to illuminated the dark spots in the sun. gavin purrs against him, catlike, and warm, softer than the wool draped up to their stomachs, which still feel like pins and needles, static rubbing on static.

you cannot rest now, cannot rest now, cannot rest now.

he runs his hands through gavin’s feather soft hair, twisting and curling long strands between his sandpaper skin. there have been tolls taken on all of them, in many ways, the ways that so often matter. ryan kisses gavin’s forehead‒ melted gold, molten, burning wicks on beeswax candles‒ and wonders about gavin’s touch bringing the lost souls to their bodies again.

stormchaser, fire starter, king of monsters, prince of thieves.

 

moondriven, is what they call the hybrids that lose themselves.

hybrids are uncommon, but not unheard of, because love is boundless and transcends species sometimes‒ not physically, most of the time, but adoption of human children by the monsters happens more often than some would think. the lost are picked up by those who can spare the time, and left at villages sometimes. but selfish mobs exist, and they take the babies for themselves, to hold and care for. and hybrids come of it, come from the time too long spent in the presence of the other species, like a happy infection, a forced evolution.

and the ones that spend too long become too _much_ like them.

gavin, and others like him, border the line. old werewolf tales are based on the idea of moondriven, ryan knows. to be yourself, and different all the same, lost in the call of the moon, reaching for it, for who you’re meant to really be. they lose themselves in their desperation to go home‒ distantly, out of body, ryan wonders if all moondriven are as godly as gavin, as sunlike and bright in their normalcy.

probably not.

gavin was born for godhood, born to soak in sun rays, and brought to the forest to be dimmed‒ raised in darkness only to shine brighter, and go farther, and be stricken with fierceness once every month, something so beyond his control.

thunder rumbles and echoes across the cove. the waves crash with intensity, the oncoming storm, wavering tides.

supercharged oceans, drowned off the beaches, tridents at the door.

 

the night comes, and ryan does not drop his pearl yet.

gavin crawls and stretches in the moonlight, and his eyes go voided and black, dark misty smoke curling from his slow grin. there is nothing empty about him, about the thunder that rumbles across the sea and churns it into whirlpools too close to the edges, about the lightning that illuminates the horizon. gavin’s whole body seems in tune with it all, electricity crackling up and down his arms like it always did, but visible, bright in the shade of the looming cliffside.

ryan loves the cove dearly. part of him breaks from it’s usual tangent‒ awestruck by gavin‒ to worry, shortly, about impending gunpowder and smoke clouds once more, a crater in their careful home, and gavin gone with it. gavin hasn’t been set off before, but then again, who’s to say.

gavin’s gaze drifts from the moon, for once. ryan stills in his chair when those eyes find him‒ far, far below, he almost sees the white pupils, thin and beady, needlepoints in darkness, and gavin reaches up with a sincere smile that burns, a stamp on ryan’s fate of going or staying.

 

michael wakes up with a thunderclap. when he looks outside, there are shadows moving beyond the cove’s edge.

 

pearl shards scattered in gavin’s garden like crystals.

 

gavin pulls ryan along gently by the arm, into the forests, where the trees curl around them and their path and footsteps are dusted over by the gentle summer breeze. rain never reaches down here but gavin is a livewire, and they’re connected, ryan’s hairs are on ends, lichtenburg branches smoldering on trees beside them.

burning pine and petrichor.

beyond the shadows of the trees ryan saw purple, heard whispers, long lost souls and dragon roars like drums of war in the distance in time with his heartbeat. he tasted salt on his tongue, and the world swayed in time with the magic that surged in his veins, skin going to night, blood beneath violet and luminescent. he blinked, and it was gone, but there was a pull towards where gavin was taking him, where the moon sat high above the trees and loomed, cold and comforting, home away.

ryan slips his wrist out of gavin’s clawed grasp, and instead intertwines their fingers, the electricity between them warm and safe like beds of cotton, or silk, or leaves from oak trees sewn together. gavin smiles, sunlight, fireworks, boiling lava in the deep pits of underworlds where for once, they might feel safe.

ryan, when he can, dreams of endlessness. the dragon speaks to him.

once, gavin whispered. once, gavin murmured an impossible story. gavin can’t sleep, but he’d done it, dreamed once, of others like them‒ someone who echoed his face, with purple and black instead of void and mottled green. of a dragon in human shape, of a messy friend who’d been a separate type of king of beasts. a separate set of twins, firey and soft-spoken, a trio of hybrids, impossible, an ice regent, untouchable, and more and more, endless amounts, like them, lost to timelines, lost to destinies.

they pull themselves, alone, into their clearing, and reach into the moonlight. ryan sits and watches gavin purr in amusement, lost in his wonder, in the mystery. moondriven and clear sighted, basking in the glow of reflected light that was and always had been his own, and ryan opens his mouth.

and says it.

he _says_ it, and gavin stops, and looks, slowly reverting back. the sky is clear above them, but thunder still rumbles in the distances, and the one thing left of gavin’s moondriven blood is the sparks and static, impossible blue. ryan feels the ice in his soul, now‒ biting cold curling deep into him (needlepoints, scratching wool, rose thorns blooming, roots in the veins).

but gavin smiles (crowns and towers, kingdoms lost, daggers sharpened) and melts it all away.

unintentional, but well meant, and so deeply so.

this time, when they kiss, it’s not quite like it usually is‒ the candle wax is there, and the heated metal, but none of it burns, and the static does not numb him, instead bringing life into heart, making it beat harder than before, again, again, againagain _again_ , and kissing gavin free is what ryan has always wanted.

 

gavin is a lot of things.

king of monsters, prince of thieves, moondriven, heir of the forest, _supercharged_.

what a word, supercharged.

and now ryan is supercharged too.

**Author's Note:**

> my [tumblr](http://transvav.tumblr.com)  
> ;3c


End file.
